That Slippery Intuition

What we mean by words is, ultimately, intrinsically personal—and especially so when it comes to “objects” that are beyond the reach of the outward senses. One such word is intuition. Prodded in Kant’s direction by a post today on Siris (link), I came across this fascinating quote (source):

Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise.

       [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn]

[In the Original German:]

Unsre Natur bringt es so mit sich, daß die Anschauung niemals anders als sinnlich sein kann, d.i. nur die Art enthält, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert werden. Dagegen ist das Vermögen, den Gegenstand sinnlicher Anschauung zu denken, der Verstand. Keine dieser Eigenschaften ist der andern vorzuziehen. Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht werden.Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. Daher ist es eben so notwendig, seine Begriffe sinnlich zu machen (d.i. ihnen den Gegenstand in der Anschauung beizufügen), als, seine Anschauungen sich verständlich zu machen (d.i. sie unter Begriffe zu bringen). Beide Vermögen, oder Fähigkeiten, können auch ihre Funktionen nicht vertauschen. Der Verstand vermag nichts anzuschauen, und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, daß sie sich vereinigen, kann Erkenntnis entspringen.

This fascinates me because, in that first sentence, Kant defines intuition in a peculiarly narrow way. And for me, anyway, that definition, by itself, explains Kant’s view of reality—not least that we can only ever have access to appearances (phenomena) and never to the real (noumena).

The English version then made me curious what Kant actually wrote in German . The word he used for intuition was Anschauung—although Intuition is, and was then, a common German word. Our dictionary (Cassells) defines Anschauung as view, perception, observation, and contemplation, in that order, and finally also as intuition. Etymologically intuition derives from the Latin for  “looking at” (which is also what the literal German Anschauung means), but when I stand before a mural in a museum, Brigitte doesn’t approach me and ask “What are you intuiting there?” The word has come to have another meaning for us, with a contrarian etymology: it is a message, a tuition, from within. Thus it is the soul’s own grasp of something—which need not be sensory in character at all. Indeed, intuition is a kind of inner knowledge; it is always a feeling quite stripped of any visual or sensory modes.

Kant himself asserts that “all of our knowledge begins with experience.” Well and good. But he limits experience to the sensory whereas experience includes, for us, ranges of reality the senses know nothing about. If you stay on the reservation, you’ll never see what is beyond the borderzone.